Ever notice that you find the best things in life when you’re looking for something else?  When I left work today, I was on my way to north Hayden Road to look for a place to set up for some possible shots of the sunset.  I was headed west on Princess, and before I got to Hayden Road, I spotted a park where there was a cool pedestrian bridge that looked like it might make a good foreground for a sunset picture.  I whipped the car into the parking lot, got out and explored for a few minutes.  I found that there was a little overlook that had a perfect view of the sun setting over the mountains (although it was a bit too cloudy in the west for a lot of great color).

I got my camera out of the car, and for once I had plenty of time to set everything up and think about what I was doing.  I used the tripod and the cable release with the camera set on aperture-priority mode at F/6.3, and took a series of bracketed shots at +/- 2.0.  Once I was sure that the sunset was pretty much over as far as dramatics, I turned around and took some shots toward the east where the “blue hour” was beginning.  For these shots, I changed the aperture to F/16 to increase the depth of field.  My ISO setting on everything was 200 in an attempt to reduce the noise.

I processed the shots in Photomatix, and I was fairly pleased with the results.  Let me know what you think!